The human body is constantly being stressed (The Stress of Life, Hans Selye, Md., McGraw Hill, rev. ed., (1978)). Positive adaptation to stress can lead to an improved physical state (e.g., athletic training), while a breakdown in adaptation can result in the onset of significant medical conditions (e.g., heart attack, etc.).
Monitoring changes in a person's functional state and state of homeostasis provides an understanding of that person's adaptation to stress. In order to see changes in a person's functional state and state of homeostasis, testing must be done on a frequent basis and must include test of the major systems in the human body. These include the systems that regulate cardiac activity, energy metabolism, the central nervous system, the gas exchange and cardio-pulmonary (circulatory) system, the detoxification system and the hormonal (adrenal) system.
Various invasive and non-invasive tests are known for assessing the functional state of a person. Invasive tests include blood tests and biopsies, etc., that damage tissue in carrying out the test. Disadvantages of invasive tests include pain, tissue damage, risk of infection and inability to perform the test with high frequency (due to the associated tissue damage). Invasive tests also tend to be relatively expensive and often require a visit to a medical facility (as opposed to home or field use).
Pseudo-invasive tests include tests that are not literally invasive, but which cannot be repeated with high regularity due to deleterious effects on the body. Examples include X-rays (excess radiation) and VO2 maximum treadmill tests which require a person to run to exhaustion (this may be difficult or impossible for person in a weakened physical state to perform regularly). With the exception of direct tissue damage, pseudo-invasive tests tend to suffer from the same disadvantages listed above for invasive tests.
Non-invasive tests tend to have much lower incidence of tissue damage or the like and, therefore, they can be practiced with higher frequency. Examples include temperature and blood pressure testing. While non-invasive tests are beneficial in that they can be practiced more regularly and tend to be less expensive, they are also disadvantageous in that they tend to provide a limited, direct measurement of a physical condition parameter. For example, a blood pressure reading simply states the current blood pressure, but does not provide information on what body system or systems are functioning improperly and causing the blood pressure to be high or low.
In order to better assess a person's health and adaptive response, it is desirable and part of the present invention to obtain and generate more information about that person's current functional state. This can be done in part by making indirect assessment of a person's health based on directly measured parameters. It can also be done by testing a greater number of body systems and/or strategically selecting or designing tests that provide comprehensive assessment data from a small number of tests.
A need thus exists for an apparatus and a method that provide a combination of non-invasive tests that more comprehensively, efficiently and inexpensively assess a person's current functional state and their state of adaptive response.
The art of physical and functional state assessment is also limited in that the equipment required for certain test, for example, cardiac and brainwave analysis, tends to be expensive and stand alone, requiring a “subject under test” (SUT) to travel regularly (and at great distances in rural areas) to the site of the machine for testing. This also necessitates a greater number of machines, one at each hospital or assessment facility, which in turn results in a greater overall expense for machines purchasing, increased cost per test to recuperate the purchasing cost and increased insurance rates, etc.
Thus, a need also exists for a distributed testing arrangement that permits SUTs to be tested where they are (eliminating unwanted travel and energy use) and drives down the overall cost of assessment and assessment equipment, among other advantageous.